The William and Mary Quarterly is the leading journal of early American history and culture. Founded in 1892 and published by the Omohundro Institute in Williamsburg, Virginia, it is one of the oldest academic journals in the United States and was one of the first ten archived on JSTOR. Today, the Quarterly ranks among the most-cited journals covering a specific time and place and is one of the most-respected and most-acclaimed historical journals in the world.

The Quarterly nurtures, publishes, and reviews important new work representing the broadest chronologies, geographies, and themes currently explored by scholars of early North America—treating multiple populations and language groups; spanning the fifteenth to the early nineteenth centuries; and ranging across the continent and around the Atlantic world.

We seek articles of scope and significance that speak meaningfully to multiple fields, engage fresh methods, and highlight new sources. We publish critical forums and review essays as well as substantial examinations of individual books. To stimulate new conversations, we sponsor annual workshops on significant themes.

Recent articles have examined Atlantic history as family history, English sailors in sixteenth-century Nunavut, the regulation of sex in early Bermuda, torture in early New Orleans, social networks in the French-Illinois borderlands, Haitian revolutionaries, scientific knowledge in Florida, child labor and schooling in New England, natural history and the slave trade, and the republican turn of 1776, among many other topics.

The Omohundro Institute publishes a print and an online edition of the journal in January, April, July, and October. Open WMQ makes immediately and freely accessible the “Reviews of Books” section of the journal as well as online-only supplements and digital projects.

Anchored in history, we invite submissions from all relevant disciplines and all academic ranks. Scholars of anthropology, archaeology, art history, economics, history, history of science and medicine, law, literature, material culture, and political science have contributed to recent issues.

A highly selective journal, we commission double-blind peer reviews for seven or eight times as many manuscripts as we can publish, hoping our rigorous review process will assist the authors we accept and the many we cannot. Our production staff and assistants thoroughly fact-check articles and work closely with authors to ensure essays are clear, appealing, and accurate.

Producing a well-curated, high-integrity, high-impact journal at a moment of great change in academic publishing is a team effort built on the excellence of our staff and on the high standards of our readers and peer reviewers, whose generosity makes it possible for the Quarterly to be a place for the incubation as well as dissemination of new work.